While the President feels that Americans can wait until after his posh vacay to worry about jobs, ensuring diversity in existing federal jobs appears to be slightly more urgent. Before departing for Martha's Vineyard on Thursday, the White House issued an executive order to establish "a coordinated government-wide initiative to promote diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce."
Executive order 13583 creates a council of deputy agency chiefs and federal workers charged with developing a government-wide plan to improve diversity in recruitment, training, and promotion of federal workers, all due within 90 days. After that, each federal agency will have 120 days to develop guidelines of their own. ...
John Berry, the director of the Office of Personnel Management explained the action in a conference call and said that “the federal government has a special opportunity to lead by example”.
It's about time, too. According to the Federal Office of Personnel Management, minorities represent only 38.8 percent of the federal workforce and a mere 43.9 percent of the federal workforce is female.
"Diverse" and "inclusive" are not synonymous with "efficient" and "functional." If there is a specific job that requires a different cultural knowledge/language/etcetera, then go ahead and diversify away. But if 'diversity' qualifiers are irrelevant to the job that needs doing, then diversity should be irrelevant. We need to eradicate racism once and for all, but we never can if we keep promoting diversity for diversity's sake. We've evolved enough as a society that colorblindness is within the realm of definite possibility (note: we have a mixed-race president), but if we keep making race an issue, then race will continue to be an issue. Affirmative action-type policies like these accomplish nothing in the pursuit of that goal, and the higher-up liberals know it. And in a struggling economy like this, if the federal government wants to present itself as an example for the private sector, it should probably focus on an efficient business model, instead of just a diverse one. This executive order was just a feel-good political move and not a serious attempt at solving any tangible problems.